The Philippine Online Chronicles

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Provisions, an essay in episodes, attempts a codification—one could say a manifesto—of provisions or conditions under w/c a work of cultural production in the Philippine context becomes classified as art. The word “provision,” however, also invokes a position of temporality, such that whatever provisions the essay arrives at can only be provisional: an argument that is made in one episode can possibly be undermined or subverted by any of the essay’s succeeding episodes. Provisions in this sense is at once a performance & a research project, a wrestling match w/ the self in words, in pursuit of a definite trajectory it hopes to but might never arrive at.

 

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Repeatedly the attempt to make stipulations about art in the Philippine context has been occasion to re-emphasize simultaneously the significance and senselessness of what has been dubbed in our literary history as “the Villa-Lopez controversy”: the debate between art for art’s sake & social commitment. Conjuring the ghost of this discussion has, appropriately enough, become ghastly—for the exhaustion it brings is bred not so much by the notion that we are past it (& should be moving on) but precisely by the weight of the fact that we are not (what are ghosts but our inability to move on from what is dead).

The practical resolution by many—also as fostered by the workshop climate looming over the field of creative writing in the Philippines—resides in negotiation: just as the social commitment of a work can be tempered by artfulness, artfulness in turn is only functional insofar as it effectively conveys commitment. The compromise, in large part, has been due to the progressive thinking by many critics & practitioners who believe that the aforementioned dichotomy should be abandoned on the ground that this divide has only been spurred by the oppressively binary structure of Western colonial thought, a system of ideology equally responsible for the unproductive opposition between form & content.

Truly, one can concede that the arts can benefit from such a compromise, commitment as content complementing artfulness as form. But art in the singular has come a long way from the arts in the plural—the arts being “ways of making and doing,” if one were to reference Ranciere—such that their definition depends on their proximity to and relationship w/ craft: art is the attempt to abandon it, the arts are the acceptance to wallow in it. It is in this sense that poetry, for example, as weaned mostly on workshops & having sucked the sourness from the teats of craft, has come to resemble advertising copy: while the latter sells products, the former sells the human spirit, & both make use of equal amounts of bullsh*t.

The practice of art, however, in the singular is a deliberate acceptance that there exists such a dichotomy—the very practice of art, in fact, performs and sustains this dichotomy—and in this binary opposition it is form that takes precedence, smashing content not into nothing but into everything: no form cannot be read. Where form is tantamount to artifice, art is preoccupied not so much w/ what it says but the method w/ w/c what is said is said—such that, if only to drive attention away from what it says & toward how it says it, much of language art has resorted to the strategies of self-reference & appropriation, bringing to mind works as varied as Joseph Kosuth’s neon verbal tautologies and Cesare A.X. Syjuco’s erasures of Nick Joaquin.

Which is to say: Poetry as art rather than one of the arts need not be written in order to be written. “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more,” Douglas Huebler wrote in 1969. To no longer write, but to re-organize what has already been written, to intervene in writing as writing: poetry is no longer what is written but how one approaches writing: an attitude, a method, a framework. A writer can keep crafting his verses to make a spectacle of his pain (his uncle fondled his testicles as a boy, his mother died of cancer on his 12^th birthday, he feels an affinity w/ the working class constantly abused by the corporate machinery of the merciless bourgeoisie, etc.) to lyrical heights of catharsis, drawing insipid tears from his reader’s eyes—but these verses are not necessarily poetry, these verses are not necessarily art. Affect is nothing if not pornography. In this sense, the conveyance of insight about the Human Condition is just as unpoetic as castigating the lumpenproletariat for refusing to take up arms against the villainy of capitalism. Poetry is in neither, but poetry is in the performance of framing either as poetry, the performance of calling attention to its artifice. Poetry can only point toward poetry, toward form; everything else is just content.

 

Photo: Joseph Kosuth's "Four Colors Four Words"